“Could be,” Danny said. “But it’s a solid step in the right direction, boys. An act of good faith. Let’s give the man the benefit of the doubt until then, yeah?”

Danny looked out at the several hundred faces; they were only half-sold on the idea. A few shouted “Fuck them!” again from the back of the hall and Danny pointed at the photograph of O’Meara that hung on the wall to his left. As dozens of eyes followed his fingers, he realized something terrifying and exhilarating at the same time:

They wanted him to lead them.

Somewhere. Anywhere.

“That man!” he shouted. “That great man was laid to rest today!”

The room quieted, no more shouts. They all looked to Danny, wondering where he was going with this, where he was taking them. He wondered himself.

He lowered his voice. “He died with a dream still unfulfilled.”

Several men lowered their heads.

Jesus, where was he coming up with this stuff?

“That dream was our dream.” Danny craned his head, looked out at the crowd. “Where’s Sean Moore? Sean, I saw you earlier. Raise a hand.”

Sean Moore raised one sheepish hand in the air.

Danny locked eyes with him. “You were there that night, Sean. In the bar, the night before he died. You were with me. You met the man. And what did he say?”

Sean looked at the men around him and shifted on his feet. He gave Danny a weak smile and shook his head.

“He said…” Danny’s eyes swept the room. “He said, ‘A promise is a promise.’”

Half the room clapped. A few whistled.

“A promise is a promise,” Danny repeated.

More clapping, a few shouts.

“He asked whether we had faith in him. Do we? Because it was his dream as much as it was ours.”

Bullshit, Danny knew, but it was working. Chins lifted all over the room. Pride replaced anger.

“He raised his glass—” And here Danny raised his own glass. He could feel his father working through him: the blarney, the appeal to sentiment, the sense of the dramatic. “And he said, ‘To the men of the Boston Police Department, you have no peers in this nation.’ Will you drink to that, boys?”

They drank. They cheered.

Danny dropped his voice several octaves. “If Stephen O’Meara knew we were without peer, Edwin Upton Curtis will know it soon enough.”

They started chanting again, and it took Danny several moments to recognize the word they chanted because they’d broken it into two syllables so it sounded like two words, and he felt blood rush up his face so quickly it felt cold and newly born:

“Cough-lin! Cough-lin! Cough-lin!”

He found Mark Denton’s face in the crowd and saw a grim smile there, a confirmation of something, of previously held suspicions maybe, of fate.

“Cough-lin! Cough-lin! Cough-lin!”

“To Stephen O’Meara!” Danny shouted, raising his glass again to a ghost, to an idea. “And to his dream!”

When he stepped away from the megaphone, the men besieged him. Several even tried to lift him above the fray. It took him ten minutes to reach Mark Denton, who placed a fresh beer in his hand and leaned in to shout into his ear above the crowd noise. “You set a hell of a table.”